Never Stray From Your True Calling

From the pain of losing his business, he extracted a single line: "Having drifted from my true calling — design and creative work — was itself the greatest failure." Why do people drift from their calling? Because lucrative-sounding offers always arrive from outside it; one's own field looks plain, and the neighbor's grass looks green.

Outside your calling, you are one of the crowd — your accumulated strengths don't apply, and you are dragged into battles of price and capital that bigger players win. Within it, you are singular: twenty years of a designer's eye cannot be imitated. The beautiful sequel: he returned to creative work, and through that very work, met me.

"Failure may have been preparation for the next encounter," he wrote. For those who return to their axis, the next door opens upon it. What is your axis — and are you standing on it now?

What do you work for?